Lake View: Published Views

particularly in the north-side of Chicago when township of Lake View (1857-1887), the City of Lake View (1887-1889) was well known for a vegetable nationwide called a celery. I begin with WBEZ's Curious City followed by 'The Lake View Saga' that was first published in 1974 & 1985. After that, the 'Hidden History of Ravenswood & Lake View' published in 2013. The next two perspectives are 'Lake View' published in 2014 & finally 'East Lake View' in 2017. The last book is from the township days about ordinances of that day - 1879.The photos I posted are from various other primarily the Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection sources. The black & white photos are from a collection by the historical association that I belonged to since 2013. I needed to add some additional text [ ] for narrative clarity.

City Of Big Agriculture: Here Are The Crops Chicago Was
Once Famous For

In the decades following the city’s founding in 1833,
Chicagoans drained swamps, and once they had gained metal-blade plows they
worked the rich soil that lurked below a vast prairie. This farming continued
for many decades, sometimes in land between roads & commuter rail
lines. The
city’s emergence as an agricultural center occurred at the same time the city
was industrializing.“If you think of it, all those things that made us this
trading town, they also made us a very good place to export,” says Daniel
Block, Chicago State University geographer and author of Chicago: A Food
Biography. Specifically, these things included great railway access,
abundant immigrant labor, central trading markets and processing facilities. Plus, Chicago had awesome soil and plenty of manure. If you’re inclined to think of 19th-century Chicago as a
railway-tangled, smoke-belching industrial behemoth, here’s more about how it
was also the first city of flowers, a pickle powerhouse and the heart of
American celery- pun definitely intended.

Celery: Miracle
food meets Lake Michigan

image - Lycheerose via Zazzle

The city’s remaining link to its once-vast celery
industry may be the celery salt finish on Chicago-style hot dogs. But 150 years
ago the city was at the heart of a celery craze that had spread across the
United States.

“Celery was huge, kind of like kale today,” says food
historian Bruce Kraig. “It was this big 19th-century food fad because people
thought it had miraculous health properties. I think it’s because it was so
fibrous and you had to chew it so long.”

So, Chicago — with its celery-friendly sandy soil, abundant fresh water and national rail transportation — was a perfect spot to grow and export the vegetable to an often dyspeptic nation. Plus, celery could be harvested as late as January

during a mild winter, so long as it was packed
in sand or soil.

image - Esty

Hundreds of Chicago immigrant farmers grew the vegetable
on what became the city’s North Side. According to 19th century Chicago
horticulturist Edgar Sanders, Lakeview Township soil was “black,” “boggy” and
“plentiful mixed with sand.” He added: “There is no land which can compete with
such as this for celery culture.” By the end of the century [and after the annexation of the City of Lake View by the City of Chicago], though, other lands stole
Chicago’s celery crown. Kalamazoo, Michigan, had cheaper land, as did
California, which had also had an advantage of a year-round growing
season. [Still] farmers in what became the Edgewater neighborhood [once part of Lake View Township] grew
celery well into the 20th century. In an essay for the Edgewater Historical Society, Carl Helbig recalls that his father grew it in manure-filled hotbeds
over “black and sandy” soil as late as the 1930's. But he admits the crop was
already well on the way out. “I venture to say that my father was the last one
to grow celery in that large a volume in Edgewater,” he wrote.

Pickles:
Agriculture Meets Industry

photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

The community of Bowmanville once part of

Lake View Township/City

In the late 1880s, Chicago was home to no fewer than
three nationally famous pickle brands: Budlong, Squire Dingee and Claussen.
These operations thrived in Chicago for several reasons: European pickle
know-how; a robust local salt processing industry; rail and other
transportation options; and — early on, at least - productive pickle farms. In 1903, the Chicago Tribune reported that there were
“12,000 bushels of onions & cucumbers picked and sacked in a day” during the
busy season on North Side farms that stretched from Bowmanville (Foster
& Western area) to Evanston.

The Budlongs

photo - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

Lyman Budlong [with the support of his wife] became an industry leader shortly after he
arrived in Chicago. In 1859 he established a pickling business near Foster and
Lincoln avenues in the middle of his Budlong Pickle Farm, which, by some
accounts, stretched across 700 acres.

The Budlong Farms

photos - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

By the turn of the century, though, a pickle blight forced pickle-makers to import cukes from outlying farms. Still, according to Eleanor Atkinson’s 1912 'The Story of Chicago and National Development', Budlong’s farm kept growing other crops [and then later flowers].

The Greenhouses of the Budlong Farm

photos - Ravenswood-Lake View Community Collection

“The farm is occupied profitably with raising every kind
of garden truck [vegetable] which can be persuaded to grow, most of it going to
city tables, but some shipped to distant points in the U.S. and Canada. This
farm gives employment to about 2,000 hands in the busy season and affords
healthful and remunerative employment to those who toil in the city during the
winter and can get out to the pickle farm for air and ready money when the work
is slack in town and the city is stifling with dust and heat in its crowded
quarters.”

But such a large farm couldn’t last forever in the
expanding city. By the 1920s the Budlong Farm had become a golf course and was
later subdivided into a residential area called Budlong Woods. Squire Dingee
also moved its operations out of Bowmanville to Lincoln Park and eventually
merged with Beatrice Foods.

Vegetables for any
season: Chicago’s climate meets European Innovation

Even though Chicago had the fertile soil and
infrastructure needed for farming, the city lacked year-round warmth. So local
truck farmers (those who “trucked” produce to Chicago’s central markets) turned
to greenhouses to supply lettuce, tomatoes, peas and other veggies in the off
season. It was a popular European technology that could be fueled cheaply by
Chicago’s abundant coal supply.

“Illinois ranked first among other states in area covered
by glasshouses [or greenhouses]. [These enterprises were scattered throughout the old Lake View well into the turn the first quarter of the 20th century.]

The Albert Fuch Greenhouses

The Wittbold & Company

images - 1894 Sanborn Fire Maps

A large percentage of these in neighborhoods of
Chicago, and several firms have each over a million square feet of glass,”
Cathy Jean Maloney writes in her book Chicago Gardens. In 1870 the John C. Moninger Co. was founded in Chicago
and would become one of the nation’s biggest greenhouse manufacturers.
Immigrants from Luxembourg ran many of the greenhouses on Chicago’s north
Side and its northern suburbs. Thousands of Luxembourgers settled around Ridge and Devon
Avenues, where the ground was higher and good for planting outdoors as well. In
the Encyclopedia of Chicago, author Kathleen Neils Conzen writes that there
were “Perhaps a hundred greenhouse clusters stretched from Rogers Park
northwest through West Ridge, Niles Center, and Des Plaines, most in Luxembourg
hands by 1919 when their growers' association numbered some 1,200 families.”

Jim Leider of Leider Horticulture is a third-generation
Chicago grower. But he says his tropical plant business today is different from
his Luxembourgish grandfather’s turn-of-the-century truck farm with a
greenhouse in Rogers Park.

“My grandfather tells a story that he had to get up
early, early in the morning to take his produce down to South Water Market,”
Leider says. “He’d load it up on the horse and buggy, sell it there, and come
back home. He said that he was so tired by the time he was going back to Rogers
Park that he would fall asleep, but the horse knew the way home.”

Chicago’s greenhouse culture wouldn’t last forever. Once
refrigerated trains could efficiently import cheaper produce from across the
country, there was less need to grow off-season produce locally.

“Plus, the cost to heat them in the winter was getting
prohibitive,” Leider says, “and rising real estate values in the city made it
more attractive for people to just sell them.”

Flowers:
Infrastructure and technology

allow Chicago to bloom

Like a lot of Chicago’s flower growers, Joseph Budlong (the brother of pickle-maker Lyman Budlong) started his Bowmanville greenhouses to grow vegetables, but when their profitability declined, he transitioned to flowers exclusively by 1880 with the Budlong Nursery around Lincoln and Foster Avenues. A 1907 description in American Florist magazine estimated that the Budlong Nursery housed 30,000 grafted rose plants (mostly American Beauty and Richmond) in its dozens of glass houses. It may be hard to believe, but for several decades
Chicago was the nation’s flower capital.

photos - Italian Court Flowers

[As a side note,] one of the earliest citizens to grow commercial flowers,
especially roses, was Dr. John A Kennicott - [Kennicott Brothers Company]. In 1837, he settled in what is now
the village of Glenview - specifically a National Historic Landmark called 'The
Grove'. In 1881 his descendants built a wholesale business that served flower
farms across the city and suburbs.Great-great-grandson Harrison “Red” Kennicott says
Chicago was the nation’s floral capital for some familiar reasons. “For one, Chicago was a railroad hub and that was the
main means of getting flowers to other localities,” he says. “There was also a
very inexpensive local source of coal to fuel the greenhouses. And there was
also a plentiful supply of labor to work in the greenhouses.” In the early part of the 20th century flower greenhouses
covered swaths of the North Side and northern suburbs. And there, Kennicott
says, growers produced hundreds of thousands of roses and carnations that would
find their way to tables, weddings & graves all over the country. [Kennicott Brothers is still a wholesaler who sells to retailers like my dear friend who owns Italian Court Flowers.]

But by the 1950's, affordable and reliable air shipping
shifted the center of flower production to California and later South America. Perhaps the oldest legacy of Chicago’s floral past can be
seen in the annual Chicago Flower and Garden show, which started in 1847 as the
Chicago Horticultural Society’s “Exhibition of Fruits and Flowers.”

The Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association Account

Lyman A. Budlong was a Rhode Island native who moved to
Chicago in 1857 & founded the mammoth Budlong Pickle Company and Budlong
Nursery in the 1860's. The nursery, located near West Foster Avenue (5200 north)
& California Avenue (2800 west), sat on more than 10 acres of land & at
the turn of the century produced 100,000 bushels of pickles, 100,000 bushels of
onions, & 50,000 bushels of assorted garden vegetables. The nursery, known as
the "village of glass" was composed of 18-20 greenhouses filled with
roses, carnations, & chrysanthemums. Budlong's bounty was known nationwide.
The elementary school at 2701 West Foster Avenue, on the former grounds of the
business, is named after him, as is the local neighborhood, Budlong Woods.

My family never owned one, but we certainly were in the
celery-growing business. Mr. Miller lived across the alley from us on
Hermitage. He was a retired farmer, but there was nothing to indicate “farmer”
in his dress. He always wore a vest and tie. My father, Bruno Helbig, was a bricklayer, but he dressed
like a farmer. Some mornings, Mr. Miller would walk through our yard and stop
to talk with Bruno in his high, squeaky voice. I don’t know how much my father
knew about growing celery before talking to Mr. Miller but, once he got
interested, we sure grew a lot of it.

Our backyard was exceptionally large since Clark Street
ran on an angle and the Northwestern Railroad ran straight, north and south.
There wasn’t room enough for another street so we got a large lot. The soil was
black and sandy - ideal for growing celery. But you didn’t just plunk seeds in the garden and expect
celery to grow. The plants had to be started in hotbeds to make their growing
season long enough. The hotbeds had to be ready for seeding by March 15th of
each year. Our four hotbeds were patches of earth covered by bottomless,
boxlike structures we constructed with planks and topped with special glass
windows with cedar frames. The planks were low in the front and higher in the
back so that the hotbeds would be slanted toward the sun.

The ground under the boxes was dug out to make room for a
layer of horse manure, then soil was relayered over that. As the manure
fermented it got hot. The boxes trapped this heat as well as the heat from the
sun, making the hotbeds warm enough to merit their name. There were a couple of
stables within wheelbarrow distance, one at Ridge and Ravenswood and the other
at Consumer’s Ice Plant, which supplied our needs very well. Besides celery, we seeded tomatoes, lettuce, endive,
cabbage, kohlrabi and radishes. The garden provided needed food for our table
and my father sold the tomato plants for 25 cents a dozen. Those were
Depression times and my father couldn’t find a job at his trade, so the tomato
money was welcome. My mother even raised his beer money allotment. But celery
was always king of the crops.

The celery plants were very fine when they first came up,
but later they needed more room to grow in the hotbeds. Except for the
tomatoes, the other plants had either been harvested or relocated elsewhere in
the garden by the time this was necessary. Thinning out, or transplanting, was
a back-breaking job, especially in hotbeds since you couldn’t get at the plants
without reaching down into the boxes. Meanwhile, the area of the garden where
the celery was to be planted next was being prepared with our own compost or
more horse manure. One year, when I was a milkman driving a horse and wagon,
my father talked me into bringing some horse manure home from work in my ‘62
Plymouth convertible. I took the cushions out of the rumble seat and filled it
with manure. I never could get it all out of the car. Trying to wash it out
with a hose only drove it further into the crevices. From then on my car
smelled like a stable.

Transplanting the celery from hotbed to garden was
another monotonous job. A couple of weeks before Halloween, we would dig a
trench a foot deep, dig up the celery, now 4 to 5 inches tall, pull off any
yellow stalks and replant it in the trench, real close together. We did the
same with our endive, though the trench was not as deep, and covered up both
crops with burlap bags and leaves to prevent freezing. After a couple of weeks,
the celery and endive would bleach and turn yellow. The celery would be real
tender and the endive would no longer be bitter.

My father was very proud of the fact that we had
vegetables out of the garden at our Christmas table. We had celery on the table
at every evening meal and celery in the stuffing of our Christmas bird.

When I married Lorraine and brought her to my home, my
father, who lived on the second floor, finally gave up on trying to make me a
gardener and taught my wife what he knew about the subject. At last a reprieve!
I was called upon to help, however. One year my wife decided we should gather
the dead alewife fish that Lake Michigan washed ashore on the beach and use
them for fertilizer. We had to spread mothballs all over the yard to keep the
neighborhood cats from digging up our garden. Everything grew very well - the
tomatoes, corn, even the carrots. But you couldn’t eat them; they tasted like
rotten fish!

Despite the “fishy” story, my father taught my wife well.
She continues to garden, although in a space one quarter the size of my
father’s garden. Our garden does not have even one hotbed. We do not plant
celery!

I venture to say that my father was the last one
to grow celery in that large a volume.

Narrative & Navigation

This has been a passion of mine for several years. This passion began with a simple inquiry of an ornate gate that surrounds a parking lot on my street. This singular inquiry lead me to learn everything I could online about the history of my neighborhood - Lake View, one of the 77 neighborhoods within the City of Chicago. Consider this topical blog as an online library of information for educators like myself who intend to teach others about this historical & robust corner of Chicago. I hope you enjoy the read and add any type of comments at the end of each post. I have a Facebook presence called 'LakeView Historical'.